This narrative epic was suggested by an infamous Scrabble match involving Messrs. Dragowicz, Balding and O'Halloran. Gilly announced that, if she only had two more letters, she could spell a certain female anatomical feature (I’m not quite sure what she was getting at, but apparently a ‘c’ and ‘l’ or ‘i’ and ‘t’ were two possible combinations. In the poem, it is cryptically referred to as a ‘little nub of blisse’). Finoula promptly asked what a ‘********’ was. By the way, we were expecting another container ship full of the Shamen’s works (the contents of the Smithsonian Institute’s Fluntz Lloyd Wright wing), but the ship was tragically consumed by a pod of killer whales as it entered the Bermuda deeps (DJ).
Fair goes, mate! I get a migraine just thinking about this, um, work, so will simply supply a technical note: Here we see the full bodice-ripping power of early Hoeyan prosody, unleashed in the form of rima diarhoeya, a metre that consists of apparently maniacal stress patterns (though one can, of course, be sure the master craftsman Hoey is always really, er, in control) and is constituted of lines between ten and twenty-three syllables. Compare this with the serene, Augustan restraint of the metre of a late work such as At Chippers Did They Revel, composed in terser rima form (JHG).